Re: InSchool AS/400 Evangelism

Chris Rehm wrote...

>I would like to see them provide hardware to school systems. But I think
what
>I would really like to see them do is provide an internet connection for
>schools that accesses Advantis so that they can have a direct connect to
>AS/400s that are maintained by IBM. 

This is a great idea. Keeps cost down by using ever-decreasing comm costs 
to make local hardware uneccessary. 

>IBM could upgrade the systems as they see
>fit and use them for other purposes (public web sites, sales demos,
>whatever). My guess is that there are a lot of CPU cycles sitting around
>waiting for a demo or whatever that could be used. 

"Our IBM AS/400 SchoolServers program operates around the clock, with 
99.9% uptime last year. How often are the servers running your business 
servers out of service?"

>It doesn't add much to my overhead if I add a machine to my data center and
I
>already have all the experience on how to manage it sitting around handling
>my other machines. In comparison, it adds a lot to my overhead if I don't
>have existing AS/400 talent and I want to implement one for training
students
>with. 

Savings on the machines and their support, but there are still definite 
creation, administration, and support costs to offset here. Especially 
wrt connectivity.

>Even people with a lot of AS/400 experience may have little or no knowledge
>of Java or Notes or the AS/400 firewall. IBM has to keep people on staff who
>are familiar with these topics anyway. If the Java guy is in England, it
>doesn't make any different to him that the machine he is maintaining is in
>Japan, or the US, he just logs on and does his thing. 

Level 1 = email, but to whom?. Level 2 = ?, Business Partner liasion? 
Leap over startup problems by inviting business partners to train 
existing staffs as guinea pigs?

>So maybe there is a way for IBM to structure donating Java workstations to
>universities and hooking them to Advantis and then giving them use of some
>subset of internal machines. 

Could do worse than having students doing cool new stuff on IBM software 
with their hands on IBM keyboards. What would really help is offering 
good courseware to bridge the gap between RPG and Java, creating 
evangelists to pull shops forward.

>Probably for a couple of million IBM could get some guys in house to figure
>out a way to make this work. When done, this would not only get AS/400
>education into the school system, but would be a living, breathing model of
>the type of infrastructure IBM wants the world to adopt. Of course,
>successful trainees on such a network would have a lot of good ideas to
>implement when they entered the workforce. 

How about "The _Proven_ eBusiness Server of Choice"


/* -=- -=- -=- -=- -=- -=- -=- -=- -=- -=- -=- -=- -=- -=- -=- -=- -=- */
/* Jerome Hughes                        jromeh@aol.com                 */
/* InterPro Consulting Services         www.interproinc.com            */ 
 
/* Rosemont, IL USA                     these are my own opinions only */
/* OMNI User Communications Director    www.omniuser.org               */
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But by reshaping the meeting environment, by redefining its ecology, one 
can dissolve many of the barriers to fruitful collaboration. In many 
respects, it's easier to get results by changing the environment than by 
trying to persuade people to behave differently. -- Michael Schrage, No 
More Teams! Mastering the Dynamics of Creative Collaboration, Currency 
Doubleday,1989,95



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